[HP Touchsmart 310-1125y] Installing Linux Mint

Hello @John
Now it's my turn to apologize for not responding, busy working and haven't really cared about the pc that much. Thing is that I follow your step-by-step guide and at one point you say run the command ls /sys/firmware and that it should return

, but my terminal returns "acpi memmap" both when using Legacy, UEFI Native and when using UEFI Hybrid... This is why I really "dont trust myself or the pc" and proceed. Also, kinda weird that Linux cannot detect the W10 installation...

 

Hello bjorn96 - You mentioned that your BIOS boot settings include Legacy, UEFI Native, and UEFI Hybrid(?). Is there any chance your motherboard is made by Gigabyte? I remember reading an article somewhere about the various problems with installing Linux on Gigabyte boards that use Hybrid UEFI. Give me a chance and I'll see if I can dig it up. In the meantime, there are several questions I need to ask:

1.) When you created your Linux Mint installation media, did you use a DVD or a USB flash drive?

2.) If you used a USB flash drive, did you use Rufus to create it?

3.) If you used Rufus to create the USB flash drive, do you remember the settings you used? Specifically, what did you choose for "Partition Scheme and Target System Type", and what did you choose for "Filesystem"? These two settings might be related to why you're not booting into EFI mode from your installation media and why you're not seeing "EFI" listed when you run "ls /sys/firmware".

4.) Please do this: Boot into Windows, open Disk Management, and verify that there is a small FAT32 partition as the first or second partition on the disk. This is the EFI system partition created by Windows. Then right click the area where you see "Disk 0" displayed, select "Properties", then click the "Volumes" tab. Do you see "GUID Partition Table(GPT)" listed as the partition style?

 

1. USB
2. Yes, I used Rufus
3. I used the settings that Rufus choose automatically when the iso was loaded
4. Is this the USB or the HDD?? If its the HDD, there is no FAT32 partition present as I can see...

 

Good to hear, MJ

The nice thing about Linux is drivers are fully tested before being added to the repo - With Windows it's hit-'n-miss...thus the BSOD's ("Something happened?" LOL)

 

I am having something of a similar but opposite error right now with FreeBSD. FreeBSD is having issues with my USB ports, but if I boot into Windows everything is fine. I am back on my Slackware rig for now and planning on wiping out FreeBSD on my test rig and probably install another distro to see if I am having the same issues.

I can see the errors when I am in console runtime, but when I'm in Cinnamon I don't see the errors but I still can't use my USB ports. The really funny thing is that I have a wireless USB mouse and it works just fine.

 

Just a suggestion, but you could still partition off your drive in such a manner that you can install/test other distros. Just takes a little manual partitioning when you are setting up your main distro.

The way I do it is that I set up a minimum of 3 partitions for my main distro; /, /swap & /data. /data is like my /home but I keep all my personal/downloaded data and backups there. You rarely need a lot of space for a distro. my /swap is generally set at 2GB and I rarely see it getting used, / i usually set at 50GB, and /data I set to whatever. Then the rest of the drive can be used to test other distros. But you have to be careful with things like GRUB. Learning a little about bootloaders is a good idea.

 

My test rig is a 2007 Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop. It didn't happen the first few times I installed FreeBSD, it only started happening after I was testing FreeBSD in a VM under Windows. There are no more updates for it. I have a modded BIOS as well (SLIC 2.1), but like I said, it only started happening recently.

 

Possibly, but it started happening after I was testing in a VM, and I didn't see it there. It happens on full metal installs. I was actually thinking about wiping the whole HDD, doing a LLF and resetting it up from scratch.

 

I use Darik's Boot and Nuke with a DOD Short, Mersenne Twister PRNG, 3 passes. It took 7 and a half hours to complete on a 500GB 5400RPM HDD. So beware if you are thinking about a LLF.

 

I've used Windows since Windows 1.0. I was an engineering assistant for about 20 years and ran the department shared HP-UX Me10 cad servers as the admin on HP 9000 workstations for about 10 other people before PC's became powerful enough to run cad. I remember installing the Unix system on those workstations by booting and installing from a tape cartridge. Wow, it took all day to boot from a tape and install the operating system. The 680-MB (yes megabyte) hard drive serving those workstations was 1 foot square, 3 feet long and weighed about 100-lbs. The hard disk in my current desktop is 3-TB and weighs about 1-pound. It really makes you appreciate modern computer hardware and USB flash drives.

I have dabbled in using Linux since RedHat about 15 years ago. Recently I've played around a little with Ubuntu, but never really liked it.

My go to operating system has been Windows XP & 7, but I was a Windows 10 insider for about six months and currently use that.

About a month ago I installed Linux Mint 17.2 on an old Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop (upgraded to an Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 and 4gb ram), dual boot with Windows 7. I really like it.

The Linux Mint recognized all of the laptop hardware and installed the correct drivers. Everything seems to work ok.

I have since installed Linux Mint in Virtualbox on my Dell Optiplex 790 desktop (Intel i5-2400 with 16gb ram) that is running Windows 10. I gave Linux 4gb of memory in Virtualbox and it runs as fast as it does on the dual boot laptop.

I also like a lot of the Linux software packages offered by the Mint Software Manager.

Of course Firefox runs really well in Linux. LibreOffice was my go to office suite in Windows and it is also in Linux. Kb3 is a great dvd burner (mainly used to make Linux install dvd's - in Windows I use Rufus to make bootable Linux flash drives from Linux ISO's.) If you are into space or astronomy, take a look at Stellarium (a Linux virtual planetarium). Wow, I haven't seen a paid astronomy program as good as Stellarium.

As I use Linux Mint more and more I can see giving up Windows eventually. Especially since Linux is free and you don't have to mess around with activation etc.

 

Hello Michaela - One thing I'd like to mention before you give up on Windows 7 entirely: Exactly what error message was displayed when Windows hit the skids and BSOD'd on you? On my own dual boot laptop, a Lenovo Thinkpad T400, I also had to contend with Windows 7 having random BSOD's from time to time while Linux Mint continued to perform flawlessly. When it happened the last time, about two months ago, I managed to grab a pen and jot down the error message before it disappeared when the machine rebooted, and it indicated "a memory fault occurred outside of the paging area".

After doing a brief Google search I came to realize that the problem had to do with my machine's physical memory. So I tested it using memtest86+, and sure enough, an error occurred on the very first pass. By swapping DIMMs and retesting I found that the DIMM originally installed in memory slot 2 was the one with the problem.

What was happening was this: Linux Mint with the Cinnamon desktop uses around 450MB of system memory at idle, and rarely uses more than about 1GB of memory regardless of whatever program(s) you're running. So it only used the 2GB DIMM installed in slot 1 and never needed to access the 2GB of memory installed in slot 2.

But Windows 7 routinely uses about 1.2 GB of system memory at idle, and depending on which program you open, this could increase to between 2-2.5GB, and sometimes more. And when the DIMM in slot 2 came into use, I'd get a BSOD.

So before giving up on Windows 7 entirely, test your system's memory first. The next time you boot up, you can find memtest86+ on the grub boot menu. On my system with 4GB of installed memory, the first full pass takes about 30-35 minutes to complete.